Mark Brown
|
|
Background |
|---|
Born into the forest industry in Canada, Mark’s first experience in forest operations was around the family saw mill and contract operations. Based on this initial exposure, he built on his practical experience by obtaining a forest engineering degree from the University of New Brunswick (UNB) and taking a research position with the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada (FERIC) in the transportation a roads group.
Over the first six years Mark was involved in research that looked at the cost of forest trucking operations including maintenance costs and fuel consumption, safety of forest transportation, as well as the maintenance of forest road networks. In working with the Canadian forest industry, solutions were developed and implemented to reduce fuel consumption, improve vehicle payloads, improve operator safety when securing log loads, use alternative modes of transportation and improve road maintenance at a lower cost. Through this time as a researcher at FERIC, Mark obtained a Masters in Engineering from the Universite du Quebec with the thesis topic “Managing the Rehabilitation of Forest Roads Using Historical Daily Data collected by the Opti-Grade System”.
After six years Mark took on the leadership of the transportation group at FERIC looking after a team of seven research staff, developing solutions to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and safety of forest transportation operations in Canada. In September 2007, Mark left FERIC to take a programme leader role with CRC forestry in Australia providing research and solutions on the forest operations for the Australian forest industry.
While his overall scope of work has increased with time and with the different talented teams he has worked with, Mark continues to have a strong interest in the efficiency of transportation systems and implementing transportation systems that meet operational needs at minimum financial and environmental cost.